My paper analyzes the role of self-translation in the works of bilingual writer Raymond Federman (1928-2009). Born in France and immigrated to the United States in 1947, Federman wrote novels, short-stories, poetry and criticism in English and French, translating himself into both languages. In an essay titled “A Voice Within a Voice: Federman Translating/ Translating Federman” (1993), Federman spoke of his inner tension towards self-translation as a creative necessity, despite what he dubbed as the “horror of self-translation”. In his view, self-translation is to be thought of as “complementary” to (and not “substitutive” of) the source text. My paper will focus on his The Voice in the Closet / La Voix dans le [cabinet de] débarras (1979/2008), a work which is emblematic of Federman’s bilingualism. Presented as a «bilingual novel», the book offers an English and a French version of the same text, both versions written by Federman. It is a highly peculiar, unconventional text, where the author translates a traumatic episode of his childhood during World War II into a bilingual, unpunctuated stream of words. The dialogue between the two languages of this text will be analyzed in order to assess whether their proximity may clarify or articulate some of the semantic and syntactic ambiguities of an utterly hermetic text, and what spaces of interference and creativity are left in the process of self-translation.